Kahane Cooperman and Raphaela Neihausen (Joe’s Violin)

Kahane CoopermanKahane Cooperman is a documentary filmmaker and television producer. She directed and produced the 2017 Academy Award-nominated short documentary “Joe’s Violin”. Currently, she is the Executive Producer/Showrunner of the Untitled Holcomb Project, a non-fiction series for SundanceTV. Prior, she was the Executive Producer and Showrunner of The New Yorker Presents, a series for Amazon Prime. From 2005-2015, she was Co-Executive Producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where she was originally hired as a field producer in 1996. For her work at the show, she received eleven Primetime Emmy awards and three Peabody awards. Kahane began her documentary career at Maysles Films in NYC. She directed and produced several documentaries prior to Joe’s Violin including Cool Water (Sundance Film Festival) and Making Dazed about Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, which was broadcast on AMC and acquired by the Criterion Collection. Kahane has an MFA in Film from Columbia University.

Raphaela Neihausen Raphaela Neihausen is the cofounder and Executive Director of DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary film festival. She is also Executive Director of Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly series at IFC Center now in its 12th year. She co-hosts WNYC’s “Doc of the Week” and Executive Produces the podcast Pure Nonfiction. From 2011 – 2014, she launched the Montclair Film Festival, as Executive Director. Raphaela produced the award-winning and 2017 Oscar-nominated short documentary Joe’s Violin. Prior to that, she produced the feature documentary Miss GULAG (recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation and Sundance Documentary Fund) that premiered at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and was broadcast all over the world. Raphaela speaks several languages and holds a BSFS/MA joint degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

About the Film

Filmmakers: Kahane Cooperman, Raphaela NeihausenRuntime: 24 minutes

Synopsis:
In the Academy Award nominated short documentary Joe’s Violin, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor donates his violin of 70 years to a local instrument drive, changing the life of a 12-year-old school girl from America’s poorest congressional district, and unexpectedly, his own. Joe’s Violin poignantly illuminates how the power of music brings light in the darkest of times and how a small act can have a great impact.